Levi walked Stephen towards the opening of the tunnels as the other men went back to recover the body of Jack Firebrace.
At the opening, Levi threw Stephen’s fatigued body to the ground. A twisted smile drew across his face, and he looked Stephen deep into the eyes. The sun overcame Stephen’s sight; his pupils were unaccustomed to such vibrant light. He did not see Levi pull out the Maser.
His sidearm was of superior make than either the British Webley or the American Colt. They had a pneumatic strut designed to dampen recoil, and beautiful burled walnut stocks. Only the German officers received such elegant weapons. The enlisted men were only issued rusty, unreliable relics dating back to the Franco-Prussian War. Levi was lucky enough to have the officer’s pistol. In the sun, he could make out the fine lettering where the silversmith in Dresden had inscribed the words Gott mit uns on the slide of the gun.
All Stephen was able to see was the silhouette of the German officer, and the gleam of the sun reflecting off the brass of his shoulders. He did not see the raised Maser, or Levi’s fingers slowly squeezing the trigger, emptying the magazine in his own emaciated corpse. The last embers of twilight burned against the backdrop of the western front, and Stephen Wraysford’s sight went white.
June 30, 2009
Patient 031571
Case study 002586.2/5
Bethlehem Hospital, London
Attending Physician: Dr. Mihelic
The patient seems to be responding to the stimuli that have been presented him, albeit in an unorthodox manner. His blood pressure responds in an inverse pattern against what would be experimentally expected. In the last test, we sent him out to collect some items from the scraps of his house fire, which is the inciting incident in the patient’s psychosis. He gathered a small handful of items, which had no seeming connection, but my colleague, Dr. Seelbach, wants to find patterns in everything, so he gathered some wild hypothesis about the connection between the items. (For further reading, see case study 002586.2/1)
Under observation, the patient gathered what was closest to him, relatively intact. We would naturally not expect him to collect the charred remnants of his bed, nor would we expect him to bring out something unidentifiable, but the stimuli was to enhance sentimental emotions, trigger nostalgia for the better times, but this had no effect. He gathered, in order: a pair of black aviator sunglasses; an empty package of Marlboro Light cigarettes; a twenty-four pack of Crayola Crayons; a novelty set of glasses, complete with a large nose and fuzzy eyebrows, in the Groucho Marx mold; a tin button in support of the ACLU; an empty can of the energy drink RedBull; and a full pack of matches, advertising the local sports bar BW3.
Upon questioning about the relevance of the items collected, the patient could not identify the impulse behind the collection of the group of items that he grabbed. We suspect that his malaise created a lack of impetus in him, and that he grabbed whatever was closest, and easily identifiable as a cultural item, since five of the seven items were advertisement of some sort, and the other two involve the eyes, we think the patient’s subconscious is making some sort of statement about the reality of perception in today’s cultural marketplace. We will follow this case in detail, as the patient is of mush interest to the researchers here.
Bethlehem Hospital, London
Attending Physician: Dr. Mihelic
The patient seems to be responding to the stimuli that have been presented him, albeit in an unorthodox manner. His blood pressure responds in an inverse pattern against what would be experimentally expected. In the last test, we sent him out to collect some items from the scraps of his house fire, which is the inciting incident in the patient’s psychosis. He gathered a small handful of items, which had no seeming connection, but my colleague, Dr. Seelbach, wants to find patterns in everything, so he gathered some wild hypothesis about the connection between the items. (For further reading, see case study 002586.2/1)
Under observation, the patient gathered what was closest to him, relatively intact. We would naturally not expect him to collect the charred remnants of his bed, nor would we expect him to bring out something unidentifiable, but the stimuli was to enhance sentimental emotions, trigger nostalgia for the better times, but this had no effect. He gathered, in order: a pair of black aviator sunglasses; an empty package of Marlboro Light cigarettes; a twenty-four pack of Crayola Crayons; a novelty set of glasses, complete with a large nose and fuzzy eyebrows, in the Groucho Marx mold; a tin button in support of the ACLU; an empty can of the energy drink RedBull; and a full pack of matches, advertising the local sports bar BW3.
Upon questioning about the relevance of the items collected, the patient could not identify the impulse behind the collection of the group of items that he grabbed. We suspect that his malaise created a lack of impetus in him, and that he grabbed whatever was closest, and easily identifiable as a cultural item, since five of the seven items were advertisement of some sort, and the other two involve the eyes, we think the patient’s subconscious is making some sort of statement about the reality of perception in today’s cultural marketplace. We will follow this case in detail, as the patient is of mush interest to the researchers here.
Objectives
Objectives
After stein
Cigarette Package
Is not the sun shining in the corner here? Do we not feel the haze created by the fire engines as they extinguish the blaze burning in the trashcan? Maybe not, but we stand still at this corner waiting for this light to change so we can walk maybe home. You throw the rubbish on the ground and I walk away
Aviator Sunglasses
I remember a friend of mine, closeted as a homosexual in such a way that he was the only one that was able to see it, tell me that there were a lot of homoerotic elements in the movie Top Gun. Now I tried to remember my viewings of the movie, way back in time when I had a girlfriend who loved the movie, and tried to think of something in the film that kind of made me tingle and confuse me about just who I was. I really couldn’t. So, either I’m straight or he was wrong, or something along those lines.
Crayons
There was a joke in elementary school, about the kid that would eat paste. In elementary school, this seems like a horrible thing to do, you wonder if your insides might become glued together, the tack of the substance tying up your digestive track forever, and you would then die a horrible death of starvation. We never saw anyone openly eat paste, but there were a few that we suspected to be among the paste eaters. The topic was open to discussion on the playground, between the games of tag and kickball, where all the cool kids sat on the railroad timbers separating off the monkey bars. They never saw me doing it, and in retrospect, it wouldn’t have mattered if they had.
RedBull Can
A ten-ounce pyramid of Aluminum tops the Washington Monument. You see, the extraction process is now relatively simple to reduce aluminum silicate to the pure metal, but when the monument was made, aluminum was more expensive than gold.
Matches
Old cartoons show old men lighting ups cigarettes, not thinking that in twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred years that just such a act would be impossible to do, unless locked in the safety of your own home, huddled into the bathroom while on the outside the Environmental Protection Agency, which was barley a glimmer in anyone’s eye, gets reduced to the dust that it once was, and now smokers have to buy expensive filtration devices from the Sharper Image.
Groucho Marx Glasses
There is supposedly somewhere, a movie called Duck Soup. I don’t know what its about or who’s in it, but I was interviewing my Grandfather for a school project one time, and he said that it was his favorite movie when he was a child. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was a close second in his book, but I don’t think anyone’s been looking through his book in a long time.
ACLU Button
No, it is not I who thought of the day that I must die, but it is us who believe that someday we must finally go to church even in spite of our loudest objections against it that we have been exhorting all our lives. Now think about this one time friend, you do know where you go when you die. But the question that has plagued philosophers since the dawn of thought have, have not worried about the body, that temporary passage way. It is just a conduit, not the intangible soul.
After stein
Cigarette Package
Is not the sun shining in the corner here? Do we not feel the haze created by the fire engines as they extinguish the blaze burning in the trashcan? Maybe not, but we stand still at this corner waiting for this light to change so we can walk maybe home. You throw the rubbish on the ground and I walk away
Aviator Sunglasses
I remember a friend of mine, closeted as a homosexual in such a way that he was the only one that was able to see it, tell me that there were a lot of homoerotic elements in the movie Top Gun. Now I tried to remember my viewings of the movie, way back in time when I had a girlfriend who loved the movie, and tried to think of something in the film that kind of made me tingle and confuse me about just who I was. I really couldn’t. So, either I’m straight or he was wrong, or something along those lines.
Crayons
There was a joke in elementary school, about the kid that would eat paste. In elementary school, this seems like a horrible thing to do, you wonder if your insides might become glued together, the tack of the substance tying up your digestive track forever, and you would then die a horrible death of starvation. We never saw anyone openly eat paste, but there were a few that we suspected to be among the paste eaters. The topic was open to discussion on the playground, between the games of tag and kickball, where all the cool kids sat on the railroad timbers separating off the monkey bars. They never saw me doing it, and in retrospect, it wouldn’t have mattered if they had.
RedBull Can
A ten-ounce pyramid of Aluminum tops the Washington Monument. You see, the extraction process is now relatively simple to reduce aluminum silicate to the pure metal, but when the monument was made, aluminum was more expensive than gold.
Matches
Old cartoons show old men lighting ups cigarettes, not thinking that in twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred years that just such a act would be impossible to do, unless locked in the safety of your own home, huddled into the bathroom while on the outside the Environmental Protection Agency, which was barley a glimmer in anyone’s eye, gets reduced to the dust that it once was, and now smokers have to buy expensive filtration devices from the Sharper Image.
Groucho Marx Glasses
There is supposedly somewhere, a movie called Duck Soup. I don’t know what its about or who’s in it, but I was interviewing my Grandfather for a school project one time, and he said that it was his favorite movie when he was a child. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was a close second in his book, but I don’t think anyone’s been looking through his book in a long time.
ACLU Button
No, it is not I who thought of the day that I must die, but it is us who believe that someday we must finally go to church even in spite of our loudest objections against it that we have been exhorting all our lives. Now think about this one time friend, you do know where you go when you die. But the question that has plagued philosophers since the dawn of thought have, have not worried about the body, that temporary passage way. It is just a conduit, not the intangible soul.
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